The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History

Abstract

“The Rules of the Game,” expounded in ten remarkably bold theses, can easily be read as a synthetic retrospective or introduction to the formidable oeuvre of Arnaldo Momigliano. Indeed, this piece served as the opening chapter to his Introduzione bibliografica alla storia greca fino a Socrate (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and its subsequent reprints as an independent essay in several Italian journals and anthologies signal its importance for Momigliano. In this provocative and occasionally brilliantly witty essay, Momigliano sets forth his programmatic views on the ethos of the historian, as well as on the historical method and its applications in the study of ancient history. Here, as elsewhere, Momigliano is interested in detailing the link between ancient documents and their historical interpretations in later millennia. Ancient sources, he cautions, do not capture ancient realities transparently or completely, but are mediated documents whose historical value hinges, within certain limits, on the historian's analytical questions, inflected as they inevitably are by different ideological commitments. For this reason, he places special emphasis on the comparative method, stressing difference rather than similarity, and advises that historians with various areas of expertise collaborate, a point underscored throughout the essay. What is more, the essay contains the salutary reminder that the historian ought to attend not only to the surviving documents but also to the conspicuous silences and lacunae in the evidence.

Psychoanalysis and the antinomies of an archaeologist: Andrea Carandini, the ruins of Rome, and the writing of history

“…The empirical substance of this essay has been about why, how, and with what consequences Andrea Carandini, the archaeological investigator of early Rome, came to transgress received historical norms and then to neglect or abandon them. Most working archaeologists, prehistorians, or historians of all places or periods subscribe -that is, if and when they think about the matter at all -to some version or variant of Momigliano's celebrated catechism about working on the past that lists le regole del giuoco nello studio della storia antica, or 'the rules of the game in the study of ancient history' (Momigliano, 1974(Momigliano, , 2016. These guidelines are embedded in and bounded by the discovery and interpretative employment of documentary and ancillary sources.…”

Toward a Sociology of Traces

“…What ultimately makes a historian is the ability to read the document as if it were not a document, but an actual event of past life. (Momigliano, 2016(Momigliano, [1974: 45) Typical of interpretations of traces is the spirit of Peircean abduction (see Timmermans & Tavory, 2012;Atkinson, 2018): the use of conjectural inferences to explain some enigmatic experience by linking specific materials with theoretical generalizations via hypothesis construction (see also Misak, 2013: 47-50). Most importantly, far from taking data at face value, researchers confronted with traces are pushed to go (even wildly) beyond their surface and apparent meaning (this is Momigliano's lesson).…”